Hi. I am gathering parts and info for my first build and am looking for impressions on a couple mobo's. I am leaning hard toward AMD's 7750 Kuma and am looking at ASRock A780GXE/128 ($118.00 canadian) and ECS A780GM-A ($87.00 canadian) The Gigabyte boards are out of stock at Newegg.ca Any thoughts.

They are both "cheapo brands". ECS has been getting some bad rap around here with some poor quality. AsRock is hit and miss at times. Some boards are good but some are down right crappy. What's your overall budget and primary uses of your system?

The Model M is not for the faint of heart. You either like them or hate them.

Sorry I should have included more info. Just general use, light gaming, burn movies and music. I could probably go $150.00 (canadian) for a good board with integrated graphics if needed, or what about a board without integrated graphics and get a dedicated graphics card? From what I have read on the 780g chipset it would be good for what I need, the 790 doesn't seem to offer much more.

I haven't given ECS half a thought since the K7S5A fiasco. No personal experience with ASRock though.

The Kuma 7750 does look like the best CPU deal to be had right now. I'm not ready to upgrade but I'm strongly considering getting one to hold on to, just in case they get discontinued before this fall. Damn, just checked and they've dropped to 60 USD and free shipping at Newegg. Gotta gotta gotta!!!!

"No I don't want the Ask toolbar! No I don't want Bing as my default search! No I don't want to make Chrome my default browser!""Good grief, man! WHAT are you trying to install on that poor computer?""Antivirus."

kvndoom wrote:I haven't given ECS half a thought since the K7S5A fiasco. No personal experience with ASRock though.

what is this fiasco with k7s5a?

IIRC it was one of the boards that was hit particularly hard by "exploding capacitor syndrome" back in the day; he may be referring to that. But given that MSI, Abit, Asus, and other popular brands were affected at a fairly high rate as well, I don't see it as a particularly good reason to single ECS out for criticism.

If he's referring to some other issue with the K7S5A that I'm not remembering, then never mind...

K7s5a also had a bug in some boards that would cause it to lose all saved CMOS settings upon boot. I was unfortunate enough to have installed one of those bad apples in a system for a customer back in the day. She would call me and tell me that the computer was slow. I'd get to her house and the damn thing had defaulted to 66MHz FSB instead of the CPU's 100 (or 133, I forget), the time would be off, everything. Essentially the CPU was running 33 or 50% slower than its stock speed. The first couple times I thought it was the battery, but it would still randomly do it with brand new batteries. Just forget everything, meaning I'd have to go into BIOS and re-enter all the parameters that needed to be changed from default.

Eventually she just bought a new computer, so she doesn't call anymore, but that experience was enough to turn me against a brand forever. And no, it was never fixed by ECS.

"No I don't want the Ask toolbar! No I don't want Bing as my default search! No I don't want to make Chrome my default browser!""Good grief, man! WHAT are you trying to install on that poor computer?""Antivirus."

kvndoom wrote:K7s5a also had a bug in some boards that would cause it to lose all saved CMOS settings upon boot. I was unfortunate enough to have installed one of those bad apples in a system for a customer back in the day. She would call me and tell me that the computer was slow. I'd get to her house and the damn thing had defaulted to 66MHz FSB instead of the CPU's 100 (or 133, I forget), the time would be off, everything. Essentially the CPU was running 33 or 50% slower than its stock speed. The first couple times I thought it was the battery, but it would still randomly do it with brand new batteries. Just forget everything, meaning I'd have to go into BIOS and re-enter all the parameters that needed to be changed from default.

Eventually she just bought a new computer, so she doesn't call anymore, but that experience was enough to turn me against a brand forever. And no, it was never fixed by ECS.

Is that an earlier revision board? Mine never had that problem, but most of the time I was using the HoneyX BIOS. Apart from my board dying from bad caps , before it died my Pro version of the board (the one with USB2.0) had a lot to offer featurewise, for me.

The Model M is not for the faint of heart. You either like them or hate them.

Yep i had one and it supported both types of memory....along with a 900 tbrd a 1400 tbrd and a 2400xp and works until I killed it purposely....well at least the cpu when i ran it with no heatsink so i could watch it fry:)